First world problems but…….

I called BT to set up a new broadband account at my new apartment as all of my neighbours properties were listed on their site but not mine. That all goes through fine except that they added the completely wrong address (that doesn’t exist) for my flat in terms of the contract and where they send the home hubs, yet they gave the engineering team the correct address. Engineer comes round to mine just fine, they send five hubs out to the wrong address – each time I ring in and give them the right address. Turns out they can’t change the address (unless you’re moving), so have to cancel the contract and set up a new one with charges and extra credit checks. I don’t get any confirmation details or a BT ID through for the new account, I call in and get “you don’t exist as a customer sir”. After much arguing it turns out that the only way they can find me on my system now is by searching for me using their email address. Now I have two accounts, the net doesn’t work, the closed account is the active one and the new account doesn’t exist properly.

It’s all very postmodern and 2020. I miss London and Hyperoptic already, shit works down south.

I got sent four hubs and four BT TV boxes during this saga. Every time I rang them, their default response was to just lob another load of stuff at me.

**** me how do they even exist as a company, that is British Leyland levels of stupid.

Ok found the new CEO’s email….. “Dear arsehole, I’m writing to you as someone that’s key to the national vaccine program for Covid-19″……

I ordered a BT business line for the swimming pool I volunteer at…in April

Every week a thick accented Indian fellow rings me with an update that is simply when he is going to ring me next

Openreach have been on site four times. Each time the engineer searches fruitlessly for the line despite me telling them the last man did this.

BT tried to charge me from day one. It took so many calls to get the bills cancelled.

The Indian fellow is calling back today .. apparently.

It is an utter utter utter disaster. Neither company has got a single thing right

So they sent me a text asking for a rating between 0 and 10. I sent back 0

Within 10 minutes the Indian fellow rang and berated me for giving him bad feedback. He was super upset about it. I red him back the txt asking me to rate BT. His anger did not subside.

BT (and British Gas) will never see a penny of my money ever again. Astonishing levels of incompetence and don’t give a ****ness. Unfortunately you’re receiving their standard level of service when something goes wrong.

The amount of insane bureaucracy that they bring to any process (B2B or domestic) is completely unfathomable, their own people don’t even understand how things work. I believe that a lot of it is just to keep people in jobs and add cost to the purchaser.

There is no place in hell hot enough for them. My job in IT has meant for the last 30 plus years I have worked on and off with them a lot. They have never delivered anything but incompetence. They are by a country mile the worst company I have ever dealt with. Over that career lots of company’s have disappointed on occasion but Every project they have been involved in has failed to some degree due to them. The amount of mitigation we build in where they are concerned is off the scale.

When I joined my current company 3 years ago we were spending >£400k with them. The amount they were rinsing us for was shocking. By the end of this year we will be spending about 2% of that and every aspect of that reduction has been met with resistance, lies and disinformation. All services have been moved to other suppliers with a net spend reduction (as well as a huge improvement in services) of around 80%

Are you getting the scam BT Technical Services calls yet? I had a flurry of them (about one a day on average) during the period that I was regularly in contact with BT in Kolkata.

No spam calls yet!

Well, after calling at least a dozen times and spending 1-2 hours on the phone each time I finally got through to some lad in Bangor who felt really guilty about the whole thing – who has escalated the issue and given me his direct phone number.

who has escalated the issue and given me his direct phone number.

That is simply the third level of Hell in BT’s Inferno.

I used them a couple of years ago and found that the Indian call centre people couldn’t see the same screen as the lovely people in Ireland.

After numerous calls and hours wasted the girl in Ireland sorted the issue in 5 minutes and even rang back a week later to make sure everything was okay.

Since swapping to Virgin I have been even less impressed with them. Broadband speed is up and down even when connected directly to the router.

Where to next as my contract is up at the beginning of January?

Well, after calling at least a dozen times and spending 1-2 hours on the phone each time I finally got through to some lad in Bangor who felt really guilty about the whole thing – who has escalated the issue and given me his direct phone number

They do have a very small team of competent trained people who get the worst complaints escalated to them for resolution. If you get a named individual and contact number as you say then you might be getting somewhere. we got moved from copper to fibre a few years ago and they totally coked the whol thing up, even ended up telling me I would have to wait 12 weeks to get reconnected due to ofcom rules. I ended up with a single point of contact who sorted it in less than an a week AND was fully authorised to offer significant compensation. I got virtually free broadband and BT sport for a year off it.

My broadband throttles back from around 35mbps to 2-3mbps during peak times like Saturday evenings. Their only solution is to try and get me to do factory reset on my router or send me a new router. Clearly it is not a router issue. Interesting as well that the speed tester in the BT app always shows a speed about 10mbps faster than any other speed test app

I just got a reply from the CEO after sending the **** you I’m going to the Daily Mail email with my attached letter proving I’m part of the governments Covid response.

Buohahahah, I can’t believe that has actually worked.

I had to have BT to connect a phone line. After about six hours on my mobile I eventually got an installation date. I took the day off work and waited. Nothing.

When I called them, they said that they had phoned that morning to conform the appointment but there was no answer so they cancelled it.

I asked them what number they called on, as I’d been in all day with my phone next to me.

They said they’d used the number for the line that they were coming to connect.
Utterly useless.

Having an appointment with BT is like Tantric Sex. You stay in all day but no-one comes.

When I called them, they said that they had phoned that morning to conform the appointment but there was no answer so they cancelled it.

I asked them what number they called on, as I’d been in all day with my phone next to me.

They said they’d used the number for the line that they were coming to connect.
Utterly useless.

😀

Fabulous!

I’ve been burned by them too, where I naively signed up to them. Like a docile innocent walking into a serial killers basement

After 1 month of signing up to their broadband still no WiFi, I had a teenage son who couldn’t play Xbox live! For 4 weeks!

So much time calling them but getting nowhere.

Eventually I managed to cancel but it cost money and was an epic windpi£sing ordeal

I’ve since made it my life s work to share my pain with others and tell them to avoid them at all costs

Where to next as my contract is up at the beginning of January?

Although they’re owned by BT, I have had no significant issues with Plusnet. When I have had a couple of queries (a billing error and one I forget) they have been answered immediately. I like that you get an email from the CS person detailing what’s been agreed, and they do what they’ve said they’ll do.

Phone line and fibre broadband for £25, when BT wanted about £60. Their router is shit but I just use a BT Smart Hub.

BT (and British Gas) will never see a penny of my money ever again. Astonishing levels of incompetence and don’t give a ****ness.

Add in Talktalk and npower too.

Genuinely amazed they are still in business and people haven’t worked out how utterly useless they are.

So is everyone equally rubbish then? I’m hopefully moving, been with BT for a decade and few actual issues. Scared now 🙁

Yup! Really looking forward to when hyperoptic role out in Sheffield fully, they’ve been **** amazing for me wherever ever I’ve been. “ooh you just moved in, right then let’s go and enable the line whilst you go and plug in your own third party router if you have one via the ewan port”……voila 600-700mbps speeds wihin maybe 30 minutes of my time.

Richpenny, no they are not all equal – hyperoptic are the dogs bollocks of ISP’s but they’re in limited areas right now.

I had a mare when we moved into a new build (with zero mobile reception indoors). Multiple no-show broadband engineer appointments and 60mins to get through T1 support every evening. They even argued the toss about refunding the monthly charge despite the fact I had no working landline or broadband!

Got to the point where my boss got sick of having to cover my on calls (this went on for 12 weeks) and said they’d have to bring in a locum at £400 per shift.

So I called BT and politely asked everyone I spoke to for their name and the company address for the court summons because I had no choice except to sue them for the locum costs.

Came home from work next day and it was all working.

Would never, ever give that horrendous company a penny of my money again.

The only reason Kafka wrote about people turning into bugs, and interminable trials, is because BT didn’t exist then. Otherwise he would have written an epic tome, “The Connection”, in which most or all of the above occur, like “we will call you at a certain time, on the number of the line we have yet to install – if you fail to answer, the installation will be pushed back another month”

It’s amazing how clever people can convince themselves they are being whilst undermining their basic customer proposition. Outsourced stuff whilst trying to develop new products and so now no one really knows who looks after what. BT now seems to have ‘not quite as shit as talk-talk’ as its USP.

They’re all awful.

Vodafone connected broadband to an undeveloped plot of land for us.

Talktalk periodically managed to have a super slow narrow band connection give us a website or two.

We tried to get sky to connect a second line but they couldn’t physically locate the house… apparently.

In the end BT managed a broadband line but by gosh it is not a cheap contact .

I’m part of the governments Covid response

There is one? I wouldn’t be shouting about being part of THAT!

I swore never to give BT a penny again in 2008. So far so good!

The other thing that is concerning is how they sell to pensioners. My dad was upsold to £150/mo worth of stuff without realising it

They’re all awful.

Vodafone connected broadband to an undeveloped plot of land for us.

Talktalk periodically managed to have a super slow narrow band connection give us a website or two.

We tried to get sky to connect a second line but they couldn’t physically locate the house… apparently.

In the end BT managed a broadband line but by gosh it is not a cheap contact .

Again, I love hyperoptic. Never had a single drop out, let me use my own router, 1/2ms ping on any UK or north european gaming server, didn’t get throttled at certain times of the day – it was like cruising through the Netherlands….a blissful vision of a more civilised world built by greater minds, where even industrial parks were beautiful….and yet a vision remarkably similar to ours if it just wasn’t so shit.

Or maybe I was just really **** high the last time I was in the back of a car driving through.

Are you getting the scam BT Technical Services calls yet?

Not recently, but I did get one from Microsoft this morning, concerning the (alleged) virus security issues they had been detecting. Haven’t had one of those for a while, unless they’ve called when I’ve been at work. The last BT Technical Services call I had was ages ago, and after three calls from some bloke I had some time and decided to string them along; managed about ten minutes of my, apparent incompetence with a computer, before I read out the warning about the web page they were trying to get me to open and they hung up, oddly enough…
The Microsoft ones I just tell straight off they’re lying to me, and how I know, and they hang up.

Were in the process of building our new build, a replacement house for a bungalow we demolished. The bungalow had a bt cable for phone and broadband which was detached by a bt technician and left on the pole for reconnection to the new house. Whats the options for not using BT going forward, we need a home phone which is used also for my work. Fibre too. Any options or suck it up and get Bt/open reach to sort?

Those complaining about Vodafone etc – unless it’s their limited full-fibre service your complaint is actually about Openreach. Your broadband data goes down their copper string, their DSLAM, their fibre-network, their back-end, and briefly waves at a Vodafone server as it heads out into the internet.

Doesn’t matter who your broadband is from, if it’s FTTC it’s an Openreach service. Perceived differences between providers are likely down to the quality of the router they provide.

Yes. Openeach who are definitely not bt, are the root of all telephone woes.

It’s what is called a capitalist monopoly.

Another vote for plusnet and whilst they are part of they who shall not be named, their support is prompt and efficient and line speed reliability good too, even with the last half mile of overhead copper lines Owned by openreach that go through every bush and tree in the county to get to my home.

Hate them, hate hate hate.

We were forced to use tgem as Openreach installed free fibre to the property in ouf new development (no doubt saving Barrat tens of thousands) but in return BT had a monopoly on service provision because no one else offered FTTP packages!

Now that Sky have finally stepped up to the plate I discover I’m locked in to BT for at least another year as the free upgrade that someone casually offered me on the phone (whilst resolving yet another billing complaint) actually had a 24 month contract period which I only found out about by trawling through the reams of junk emails they send me and finding one containing all the contractual information for the ‘free’ upgrade.

Bunch of crooks

Whats the options for not using BT going forward, we need a home phone which is used also for my work.

Legally, Openreach

Less legally, a masonry drill, line tensioner (ours is a wire wrapped round the line) an NTE5 master socket, a wiring diagram, wire punch and line test number will see you right. If you can wire CAT5 you can wire a BT line. In theory. A bloke down the pub told me.

I use Plusnet but have always used my own kit. The underlying Openreach service has never been an issue and Plusnet themselves have been very efficient.

Every person i know who works in IT (well pretty much every person) uses Zen Internet for their broadband and line. Nothing flash, just fast  reliable and well supported. I was going to switch to them but got sold a deal at £40pcm for line, broadband and BTSport that turned my head. I’ll be with them though in a few months’ time as BT really are a feckless bunch of feckers

Wait, your engineer actually turned up? Last time I was with BT we had 11 failed visits to repair the line.